And with the right build and some aggressive and lucky searching early on, it's possible to achieve something truly broken: Free summons both in and out of combat. It does not matter if you lack a variety of global summons if you can spam free infinite Sky Drakes, which can be moved infinitely across your entire empire with magic road, and flood every combat with infinite phantom warriors and air elementals.
Ohh yeah, infinite Sky Drakes. There's a game-breaker right there. It's one of my favourites, too, since it does require a fair amount of skill and luck, rather than just being a magic "I win!" button. Well, I mean, getting to the point where you can cast them for free. Obviously once you reach that, yeah, you're unstoppable.
I take that approach about, say the Paradox school of design, where everything is properly balanced and the only way to break out of the balancing straitjacket is exploiting loopholes and gaming the system.
MoM wanted you to have the cool toys, but also wanted you to always eye the other side of the fence (other magic schools / builds) where more cool toys awaited.
It just had so-much-stuff(tm).
That's the main thing I found lacking in all petender games. AoW3, for example, is very similar to MoM in many ways, but also more balanced and steamlined, which takes away from the experience.
Yeah, I agree, but I think it's the singleplayer/multiplayer distinction. MoM would be an absolutely horrific multiplayer game in any sort of competitive environment. The massive imbalance in races and spells means that the meta would probably only consist of a few builds, and luck plays such a factor (in terms of what sort of neutral cities and encounter zones are in your territory) that games can easily become rapidly one-sided, and those together would lead to it being repetitive and frustrating.
Single-player is far more satisfying. The AI isn't going to break the game using cheesy strategies, so you don't have to worry about that, and the quality of your build becomes more about setting a personal difficulty level and experiencing new things.
One thing that I think MoM did really well that no other 4X game has yet to replicate is high-powered encounter zones. Some nodes and lairs on Myrror can take more firepower to bring down than enemy players, and I really like that a lot. MoM is the only 4X I've ever played where the first X remains fun and important throughout the entire game. Most games I hit a point where it becomes a slog because I've already won, and it's just going through the motions for twenty turns or so until that actually becomes formalized. MoM is the opposite - I'll refrain from finishing the game even when I could easily kill my opponents, just so I can scour the planes for new spellbooks and retorts. I rarely even actually make use of them, but it's fun to do. It also means that you've still got stuff to do if you prefer a more peaceful expansion style (and with 1.5 fixing diplo and either a lot of Life or enough Sorcery to get Aura of Majesty, peaceful empire-building is a viable thing).
I do think that Paradox is a bit of an unfair comparison, though. They're actually one of the best in terms of that sort of "lol balance" approach in my opinion. All their games have some countries that are hilariously overpowered, and some that will struggle to even survive. They've never taken the approach of "Well this little OPM in Africa should have as much chance of conquering the world as France because balance." Their questionable decisions seem to have less to do with balance, and more to do with them wanting their games to be more than blobbing simulators.
